My eyelids felt as if glue had dried between them when I cracked them open to a watery quality of light. Not quite dawn, but somewhere very close. I lay for a moment in silence, wondering what had woken me as my body thrummed. I was tired. Really truly exhausted and my body knew it, so I knew only external sounds would have woken me. I glanced groggily over my shoulder at Daryl, where he was spooned behind me. His eyes were open. I frowned, wondering if something was wrong and turned on my side to face him, slinging a leg over his hip. He didn't say anything, just spread his palm over my thigh that was still covered by my pants.

"What's wrong?" I whispered quietly as I rubbed my eyes.

He shook his head, his hair such a mess that it covered most of his face, as was usual for Daryl. "Nothin', woke up."

I nestled my head deeper into the pillow with a sigh. That wasn't uncommon for either of us. I was surprised we managed to get as much sleep as we did. Insomniac was common courtesy in this day and age. Even still, he looked like he had been awake for a while, pondering something or maybe hadn't slept at all, overthinking.

"What is it?" I asked again, stroking my fingers through his hair.

Daryl shrugged, his bare shoulder rolling. "You ever think 'bout... more?"

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"With me," he grunted, rolling now so that he was on his back, not looking at me.

I followed after him, my body sliding over his chest and resting there. "Do you?"

"Asked you first," he muttered.

"Makes a change," I joked, smiling.

He breathed a laugh, and I knew he was remembering the creek with me, "ya asked me first."

"Depends on what you mean, more what?" I whispered, but I knew.

"More… me. More than this." He expelled it in a breath, one that rose me where I was sprawled over him and brought me back down.

"This is enough," I answered honestly. "Has been since I met you." I raised my hand and swirled my fingers over his chest, skimming pockmarks that were near faded.

Daryl's body shuddered beneath mine as I passed them, but I kept going. "What about you? Remember you said you were no good at this. What were you thinking?"

He shrugged again but there was more effort to it as he fought the tremors I was causing. "You're pretty, an' young, an' I's never gonna be 'nough for you, I wanted ya to know."

My lips twisted. "You're enough. I promise."

He nodded, and his hand found movement again as his fingers stroked my thigh. "Missed your skin. Couldn' sleep."

I laughed breathlessly. "You sound addicted, Mr Dixon." But I shimmed my pants off anyway.

Daryl's hand fell back to the skin of my thigh and his breath flowed out of him, soft and almost relieved. "M'too old for you," he murmured after a moment, watching his thick fingers draw circles.

"No, you're not," I whispered fiercely. "You're enough. Just you. Nothing more."

His throat bobbed where his face was tipped to the ceiling. "I jus' a fuck to you?"

I laughed. "You're good, but not that good. I like you. I like who you are. I like who are you to other people, how you look after them."

He scoffed, his throat flooding red but his face tipped down to me. "You ain't jus' a fuck."

I swallowed at the intensity in his eyes. "I know, now."

His hand tightened on my thigh and my spine stretched, pressing my body against him. "We can still fuck though," I whispered with a smile.

Daryl's mouth twitched, stringing itself into a smirk. I smirked back, my body rolling right over his until my thighs fell onto either side of his hips. I rolled mine as I found a settled spot and Daryl's chest expanded, no sound from his mouth but everything in his eyes. He wanted me, and I was never as turned on as I was when Daryl Dixon wanted to fuck me. His hands had settled on my hips, fingers spanning until they met each other beneath my belly button. Now they dipped, spreading down to pull my underwear to the side and expose me to the cool air.

I swallowed softly, a whimper trapped in my throat as I tilted my hips back and offered everything to him. His forefinger slid down to press against my clit and I gasped breathlessly. He hummed back at me, the rough pad of his finger swirling once, twice and then twice more as I jerked and withered and gasped above him. Daryl's mouth twitched again and his finger fell away, his hands going back to the fabric settled on my hips and tugging. The whimper finally escaped my throat as I lifted my knees and helped him push my underwear off each leg, leaving me with nothing but my t-shirt on.

It wasn't all that big and certainly didn't cover the newly exposed part of me. Daryl growled as he usually did when his cock was beginning to stir, and just knowing that caused a flood of arousal to surge through me. His hands became frantic as they gripped my ass cheeks and tugged me upwards, up his chest until I had to rearrange my legs to follow.

"Daryl, wha- Fuck."

A laugh, directly against my clit where his lips were latched and sucking. I let out a throaty moan, my head falling back between my shoulders and my thighs trembling around Daryl's head. Wow. This was new. This was amazing. My hips rolled against his face where his tongue worked against my clit, his hands holding me tight. I reached behind me, gasping, my hand pushing into the waistband of his pants and tugging roughly. He grunted against my clit and more juices pulsed out of me, soaking his chin.

Breathless, I worked the fabric until his cock fell hot and hard into my hand. His groan was deeper now, building up and through me, into my own throat, and looping back out of my mouth. His hands tugged on my hips again, pulling my bundle of nerves out of his mouth but my hand stayed wrapped around him, very lazily moving. He kept pushing me down his body the way he had pulled me up until I was back in his lap. I smirked as his clumsy hands pushed mine away from his cock but it slipped from my mouth as he used the head to rub my clit.

"God, Daryl," I whispered, grinding my hips back against him.

His answer was another groan and his hand on my hip as his other kept his cock rubbing against me. "Tell me," he gasped suddenly.

My head fell forward and my hips continued to roll as I tried to push his cock into me. "What? Tell you what?"

"You want my cock," his answer was a husked out whisper that made my clit throb.

"You know I do," I gasped. "Please, Daryl."

"Say it," he grunted, his cock moving harder against my clit.

My legs trembled and my heart raced in my throat. "Daryl, please, I'm… I want… Please!"

"Say it," he hissed and my legs shook harder.

"I want your fucking cock, please!" I sobbed, just as my orgasm crested.

He picked me up by the hips and shoved me down on him, catching the end of my orgasm and expanding it outwards until it consumed my whole body. A scream worked its way up my throat, as my nerves flooded with hot lava that continuously pooled between my thighs where Daryl's cock fucked through the flutterings of my inner walls, and his hand clamped over my mouth.

I bit him hard enough to scar.

"Dani, wake up…. Dani."

I jerked awake, turning to look over my shoulder at Daryl, who I thought had called me awake. He was fast asleep, the blanket pulled up to his chin. I turned the other way, to find the voice that had woken me, and saw that Maggie was hovering over the bed, her face painted a deep red and gold in the dawn just beginning to poke through the thin blanket over the bars.

"Your turn for watch," she whispered. "You didn't come out."

"Sorry, Mags," I whispered.

"S'alright, long day yesterday," she excused me.

I glanced at Daryl again with a huff as I sat up, knowing he wasn't sleeping. He would have woken up the minute Maggie's toes pressed against the concrete in our cell. That was why the blanket was pulled up to his chin: so that Maggie didn't see. As I pulled the blanket back, I remembered I was panty-less, and flushed, hunting for them. Maggie pointedly looked away as I slipped both them, and my pants on once I had found them and then stood up to button them before I sat back down again to put my boots on.

Grabbing my coat when they were laced up, I zipped it up to my throat and then shuffled out. Maggie went to bed while I left the prison, taking off to the watch tower. It was empty when I got up there and I grimaced. Maggie shouldn't have had to come and get me out of bed. It was a known rule that you swapped shifts whilst in the tower. That way, there was never any time that someone wasn't on guard. Maggie's day had been as long as mine yesterday, and she still took the overnight watch. I'd had an emotional night, and then two intense orgasms, and I was paying for it, but I needed to fix up.

Stop being so soft. Stop letting myself get lost in the illusion of walls and Daryl's arms, in worrying about mine and Daryl's label. Life was good on the inside, admittedly, but the outside was still happening. There were still walkers trying to take down the fence, still people who may turn up on any given day. I shrugged off my tiredness, pressed my knuckles into my eyes to wake up and gripped the rifle more securely. I had lost my gun when the ceiling came down on me in that store, so I now had a replacement, but I'd never handled a rifle before I got here.

Rick had shown me how to use it when I first started taking watches, but I still wasn't very comfortable with it. The morning was relatively silent, as it usually was on watch. But that was more than okay because anything else would have meant some bad shit was going down. Daryl brought me breakfast when he was up. We talked for a little bit -as much as Daryl does in the way of talking- and then he pressed a kiss to my forehead and left to hunt. My shift was meant to be swapped at noon with Carl, but Rick called me down an hour or so before it rolled around.

I frowned in puzzlement but went down anyway, leaving the rifle because it was designated to the watch tower. I dipped my fingers into the back of my jeans for my new gun and held it before me anyway, just in case. The others seemed to be coming out too, and we waited around without Rick really telling us what was going on, until Daryl came back through the gate nearly an hour later, carrying some squirrels by their bushy tails. Carol and Glenn got the gates to let him in, and then we all converged back into the circle Rick had made of us while I put my gun away, no danger present.

When he could see we were all there, he passed Judith along to Beth and placed a hand on his holster, his usual sign that he was about to go into speech mode. "I called y'all out here to talk, 'cause I have some important things I wanna discuss," he began.

No one spoke in response to this, so he continued. "We've done a lot of really good stuff since we took the prison. We got the blocks cleared and fences reinforced; we're pretty stocked up on supplies. We got the crops thanks to Hershel, and the animals thanks to Daryl, Glenn. But winter's comin' an' it got me thinkin' about how we spent it on the road."

I chewed my lip in silence because I hadn't been with them at that point. Beth briefly mentioned that they had been travelling before they got the prison, but I didn't realise it had been all winter. With a pregnant Lori too, how had they survived? I remembered my first winter. The first time I had been truly cold since I got to Georgia. The snow had nearly made the world look pretty again. The walkers were snowed under in a lot of places, and while that was more dangerous because they were effectively hidden -until a rotten hand shot up from the earth to grip your ankle- it was also a beautiful illusion.

Pretending that there were no walkers, that people still lived and children still played in the snow, that school was closed. But even though it was a nice visual, the reality was fucking awful. Trying to find enough things to stock up on for the winter: solid boots, a big coat, hat, gloves, scarf. Food. Knowing I didn't have anything between myself and the cold but flimsy materials. Not walls, or doors or roofs. Not for long anyway, even if I managed to clear out a place. Frozen fingers and toes, chattering teeth and quaking muscles. The aching loneliness as the cold stripped my skin down to the bone and the very real fear that I would get frostbite.

The half delirious thoughts and images that I would have to cut something off. I still remembered the terror at night, shivering on the floor. The images in my mind of black toes that I would have to hack off, and bandage up, but with what bandage I wasn't sure because I didn't really have any to hand. The brutal facts that I was no doctor, that I would probably bleed out, and even if I didn't… having to learn to walk with fewer toes... or hold a knife with less fingers, no thumb... A death sentence. Other than all of that, the very basic need I suffered from was water.

Most of the creeks had frozen over by that point, and so the best I could really do was create a snowball and suck the water out of it, soaking my gloves. It was always a catch twenty-two. Stay hydrated or stay warm. Couldn't have both. I'd never wanted to die so much as I had that first winter. Everything was still so new, and raw. The loneliness, and my own grief, the insanity starting to creep up on me, the walkers. I'd faced one more winter after that, and this one would be my third one. I'd gotten better at surviving the cold months after my first go around, but I was so immensely thankful that I was in the prison for this one that I could have cried where I stood.

Rick was still talking, so I pulled my attention back from those miserable months to what he was saying. "There's still a lot of work to be done 'round here. More reinforcing on the fence, some sort of somethin' so that we can store Daryl's meat. Truth is, I think we need more people. We're runnin' ourselves thin tryina cover watches, and runs and clearin' the fence."

"What you saying, Rick, that we should start bringing people in?" Glenn asked with a frown.

There was a heavy silence, and then: "yeah, I am."

At the look presumably gracing everyone's face Rick sighed, rubbing the back of his hand across the sweat on his forehead. "Look, I know it's dangerous, and not long ago, I wouldn't have allowed it myself. But we took Dani in, and s'only done us good."

I flushed as varying people looked over at me with smiles. Thank God Rick kept talking. "I don't want this to just be a prison no more. I wanna take the bars off the cells, make doors. Thick doors."

Maggie -though clearly still tired- glanced pointedly at me, and I had to smother a grin. Rick kept talking over our shared looks, listing the things he wanted, the things he needed to carry on. I listened with increasing attention, picturing each individual thing as he spoke, and the more things that came out of his mouth, the more I wanted it too.

"I wanna real kitchen and somewhere to eat outside when s'hot. I want more cars and stocked up gas. I wanna fully equipped infirmary and a nursery, toys even, 'case babies or kids come in. I just want more. S'not about surviving no more. It's time to start livin'. Start building a community and somewhere we can spend the rest of our lives. 'Cause this is as good as s'gonna get: the prison, and we gotta start now."

There was silence as we digested what he said, and then Hershel spoke. "Do you want us to go out and find people, Rick?"

Rick shrugged. "Maybe soon, if we can spare the people. If we sort that fence some more and can slack a little on takin' 'em out. But for now, we just don't turn no one away. No more killing."

I shivered because I had suspected that was happening. That Rick wasn't just sending people away, but taking them out because they were a threat. Because they could come back, try and take what we had, and hurt the people we loved. Somehow, I hadn't been one of them. I hadn't been shot dead. I was here, and I wasn't one of those people, or a walker, but one of these guys, a part of this group, in here. With Daryl. All because they gave me a chance.

"I agree," I finally spoke up, and Rick looked at me in surprise. "I could have been one of them. But I'm not, and now I'm here, and I'd do anything, for you guys."

I swallowed tightly after I said it because it was the first time I had said it out loud: how much they meant to me now. I had known it for a while; started letting them in bit by bit, or rather, they had all fallen in fairly quickly, and I had allowed it. Beth, who was stood next to me, grinned and squeezed my side with Judith sat on her other hip. I squeezed her back with a smile.

Rick nodded at me, a small smile curling along his own face. "Every time we panic 'bout letting people in, every time we second guess ourselves, 'cause I'm sure we will, we just look at Dani. We look at her, and we know how much we love her, and we know that we're makin' the right choice."

I had to look away after that because I was crying.